Pareidolia is the phenomenon of recognizing patterns, shapes, and familiar objects in a vague and sometimes random stimulus, says RationalWiki.org. Faces are thought to be the most common things seen as an effect of pareidolia.

Photo taken by Fahrusha on November 15,2018

Multiple faces can be seen beside the cat witch nightlight.

Photo taken by Fahrusha on December 8, 2018

This is a shadow caused by towels hung on a hook in a bathroom. Seeing these faces while alone in a quiet place can be somewhat unsettling to the average person. Each individual must decide for herself where pareidolia ends and anomalous experiences begin.

An amusing case of precognition occurred while I was attempting to get some exercise this past Sunday. I was walking with a companion around a half mile plus Rundgang around a large pond or small lake. To break the monotony, I sometimes make up silly simple songs to sing softly to keep myself amused. These ditties are generally very absurd stream of consciousness numbers like:

Emergen-cy

Brain surgery

Is not for me.

Is not for me!

At a particular point on the path and out of no where, I began to sing:

Doggie treats are good to eat

For me and you

And doggies too.

Eat some doggie treats today.

Woof woof. Yum yum!

Granted, this is nonsensical and silly but exercise for the sake of exercise can be mind numbingly boring. I stopped singing and continued to walk around the path sometimes pumping my arms for extra exercise benefits. When I got around the lake to the same place where I had been singing my impromptu doggie treats song about 20 minutes earlier, there stood a tiny elderly lady in a winter coat, Hello Kitty pajama bottoms and an unusual thick embroidered helmet hat. Very elfin. She was with a younger man who could have been her son. In her hand she had a pouch of dog treats and was handing them out to two smartly attired Scottie dogs who were walking with a woman on the path. None of those people or dogs were present during my earlier circumnavigation. The elfish pixie and her companion continued to walk very slowly around the body of water and stopped twice more to give other dogs some treats.

The key to this precognitive event, I think, is the use of my stream of consciousness for the silly songs, freeing up my mind. What made it memorable was the fey and whimsical appearance of the little lady who was well under five feet tall.

Like this:

The day was so cold I wasn’t sure I’d make it to yoga class. I was in the bathroom washing and getting dressed while planning my strategy. If I wasn’t ready in time I’d have to go to the gym instead and be bored senseless on the treadmill.

My mind wandered. I started thinking about making a headband. The best way might be to crochet one in an alternating rib stitch. That would give it a bit of elasticity and keep my hair off my face and my ears warm. What color should it be? Maybe close to my hair color which is a light auburn brown. Would I ever get the time to do such a thing? I continued musing that I used to do such things fairly regularly. Where does my time go nowadays?

I was out the door in plenty of time to make the yoga class, in fact I was there before the teacher. A young woman with cropped black hair walked in two minutes later. Bizarrely she was wearing the very same hair band that I had a half hour prior considered making, crocheted in an alternating rib stitch in a muted brick red. I asked her if she had crocheted herself and she looked at me as though I might be slightly daft and mumbled something about her mother. She was clearly uninterested in chatting with me about it, which was okay, but I was a bit blown away. This was clearly not a commercially common head band but the very one I had imagined making.

This is the kind of thing that happens to me on a regular basis and I don’t often write about. Was it synchronicity, intention or precognition? I honestly don’t know and am not sure if the word matters. It is what makes everyday life magical.

Fahrusha is an intuitive reader and co-host of “Shattered Reality Podcast.”

A few days before Memorial Day weekend 2017, I went to the NJ shore. There I visited with a woman friend of many years. We walked the boards and talked about our escapades of previous years, including singing “We German” to the tune of Bob Marley’s “Jammin'” in Upper East Side night spots along with another mutual friend. That, and the UFO model on the roof of a boardwalk business led us into a discussion of psychoactive substances such as ayahuasca. But what did our Northern European ancestors do to commune with the higher realms? Why should we have to travel to South America to partake of this magical substance to become enlightened? Our conversation turned to fly agaric also known as Amanita muscaria.

fly agaric illustration

This mushroom is associated with shamanism, Santa Claus, and reindeer. You can see it on many German and Swedish Christmas cards. It is prevalent in illustrations across Iceland and probably other Nordic countries as well, but I am speaking here from experience only. I actually purchased a delicate glass tree ornament of a fly agaric mushroom at a Christmas shoppe in northern Iceland. Now think about Santa Claus. According to tradition, he lives at the North Pole and flies in a sled pulled by reindeer and he wears a red suit. This description fits that of a Siberian or Lapland shaman. It is known that tribes from the Arctic region, particularly their shamans, ingest fly agaric to go on spiritual journeys. They also herd reindeer and the reindeer also eat the mushrooms which incidentally grow underneath fir trees (Christmas trees).

Santa as shaman. (courtesy of Ancient Time News on Tumblr)

So my friend and I agreed that probably the most culturally appropriate way for us to experience higher realms would be to dose ourselves with fly agaric. This was all said largely in jest and under the influence of a vodka and tonic. No way that either of us intended to go out and find and consume potentially poisonous mushrooms that neither of us had ever seen in the “flesh”. In fact we doubted that it grew in our area of the world.

Shortly thereafter I drove to Northern New Jersey where at a familiar location I found these mushrooms.

Northern NJ fly agaric mushroom

A NOT intrepid explorer and fly agaric mushrooms in a bed of sweet woodruff under fir trees.

I have spent much time at the location in various seasons but NEVER saw this type of mushroom there or anywhere else. I am interested in mushrooms and as a child broke out in a horrible rash from excessive handling of puffball mushrooms. I always stop to look at mushrooms when I see them in the wild. Needless to say I was blown away by this seeming synchronicity, I actually felt like the mushrooms were calling me to have a taste. But I didn’t. I had heard all the stories of professional wild mushroom pickers who died from making a wrong identification.

About a week later I visited Providence Rhode Island and came upon these sweeties on an evening walk.

Providence RI fly agaric?

This was beginning to get uncanny.

Then I received this toy figure as a gift.

Toy fly agaric figurine.

I don’t usually do a photographic essay for a blog post, but this little episode really calls for it. I still haven’t ingested any fly agaric, though I can’t say I’m not tempted. I think that the late Terence McKenna explained this best. He spoke of mushrooms being conscious and their spores traveling through outer space. Could these mushrooms have been speaking to me? I think that they were. I think they were speaking directly to the Neanderthal in me.

Germanwings Flight 9525, an Airbus A320, took off at 10:01 a.m. March 24, 2015 from Barcelona, bound for Dusseldorf. The plane had 144 passengers and six crew members on board. At approximately 10:40 that plane crashed into difficult terrain near Digne-les-Bains in the French Alps. By now, dear reader, you probably know all about this very sad tragedy.

10 a.m. Barcelona time is 4 a.m. New York time. A client and friend of mine, Jill Jacobson, was at home in Brooklyn NY in the process of falling asleep. She was roused, she estimates, at 1 a.m. the morning of March 24 (3 hours before the plane took off) because words, a poem perhaps, were rolling around in her head while she was in the liminal state. She got up from bed and wrote them down. Then she promptly went back to bed and immediately went deeply to sleep. When she got up the following morning she forgot all about the words she had jotted down on the paper, perhaps because she wasn’t fully awake when she wrote them. She went outside to do some errands. When she returned home and put on Channel 7 news, she heard about the plane crash and something on the broadcast triggered the memory of the poem she wrote, something about flying and jet fuel. She went to her desk and found the note she penned during the night and this is what it said:

Like this:

A re-useable bamboo paper towel with the owner’s face accidentally imprinted on it.

Dictionary.com defines Pareidolia as theimaginedperceptionofapatternormeaningwhereitdoesnotactuallyexist,asinconsideringthemoontohavehumanfeatures. Here we see a remarkable resemblance between the owner of the bamboo paper towel and the towel itself. The man noticed the face the day after he had used the towel and put it up to dry. A cutting board had been laid against the wet towel and flattened it. The man received the roll of reusable bamboo towels as a gift from his ecologically aware daughter. I would have been more freaked out about this phenomena if the towel looked like one of my recently deceased friends. What do you think, dear reader, pareidolia or???

Happy Halloween!

Fahrusha is a well known NYC area intuitive and can be reached at fahrusha@fahrusha.com. She is available for events as well as private consultations.

A few days ago I received a link to a mind-blowing account of synchronicity reported by Dean Radin on YouTube. Dean Radin is an amazing parapsychologist who is the author of three books including the award-winning The Conscious Universe (HarperOne, 1997), Entangled Minds (Simon & Schuster, 2006), and the 2014 Silver Nautilus Book Award winner, Supernormal (Random House, 2013). I am a great admirer of his work.

After sharing this video on FaceBook I received this wonderful account of a somewhat similar synchronicity from a friend, Jon Decker, a retired educator and chiropractic doctor. He has kindly allowed me to share it with you, dear reader: (more…)

My friend Nadira likes to clip interesting newspaper articles, put two or three of them into an envelope and send them to me. Often they are about horrible things that very sick men in the Middle East do to women in the name of Islam (Nowhere in the Koran does it say that you must cut a woman’s feet off if her shoes make too much noise. I’ve checked.), sometimes they are interesting animal stories about tiny kangaroos called bilbys or a cat that rides a bus in England everyday. Almost never are there clippings about UFOs.

I am a person who has the nasty habit of jotting down notes on the backs of envelopes that people and businesses send me, causing me to retain a paper mess sometimes. Several days ago I was looking through some of my voluminous papers replete with odd notes featuring telephone numbers of forgotten people with no names attached and appointment times without a reference to whom I was supposed to meet or why. When I find a note that is still important and decipherable I jot it into a spiral bound note-book and then the envelope is recycled.

Among these envelopes I found one from Nadira postmarked 11 OCT 2011. I had read the articles within the envelope nearly 3 years ago so the contents were familiar but vague. There was an article about voodoo in the boroughs of New York and another about how children think, but the third article really caught my attention. It was titled: A Secret to Long Life: UFOs by Ralph Gardner Jr in the Wall Street Journal April 28, 2011. This article was about then 108 year old Dr. Alexander Imich. And it made my blood boil. Imich seems like a very interesting fellow with interests that parallel mine. He practices the fairly well proven theory that a calorie restrictive diet can lengthen life. Imich has a Ph.D. in zoology and worked in the area of chemistry, yet the author Gardner, seemed to make light of that caloric restriction idea which has many science-based studies that agree. But it was Gardner’s words about UFOs and parapsychology that really bugged me.